


From My Heart's Ground

by the_rck



Series: All the Faces We Were [4]
Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Ethical Dilemmas, Fluff and Angst, Kidnapping, Multi, Parent-Child Relationship, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-11 20:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12942846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Josie kept all of Will’s letters. They were actual paper letters, and they came from all over the world. From the things he said, he clearly wasn’t visiting those places, so she had to assume that someone else was mailing them for him. She wondered about the power set of whoever was doing it because each of them looked like something else until she was alone with it.She didn’t throw out junk mail immediately any more, not until after she’d sorted it privately.





	From My Heart's Ground

**Author's Note:**

> See end note for thing not tagged for because spoiler and because minor.
> 
> Title from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet XLIV in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
> 
> Thanks to Elizabeth_Culmer for beta reading.
> 
> This is going to be the last story in the arc. There will be at least one and possibly as many as three stories in the three and a half year gap between this and "And Love Is Fire," but this is done. Also, this series is, for me at least, more about character development and interaction than about surprising plot twists.
> 
> Plus, I thought of this story before I thought of those.

Josie kept all of Will’s letters. They were actual paper letters, and they came from all over the world. From the things he said, he clearly wasn’t visiting those places, so she had to assume that someone else was mailing them for him. She wondered about the power set of whoever was doing it because each of them looked like something else until she was alone with it.

She didn’t throw out junk mail immediately any more, not until after she’d sorted it privately.

Steve refused to read them when they arrived, but Josie knew that he read them later, when he thought she wouldn’t know. He also accepted her insistence that those letters not be shared with-- or even mentioned to-- other heroes who were hunting Layla and Warren. All the electronic communications were shared because Josie knew those could be intercepted even without her or Steve’s cooperation.

None of those ever came from Will, but they sometimes included pictures of him, always in the same room, always with the power suppressor on his wrist. Apart from those pictures, no one she trusted had laid eyes on Will since he and Layla and Warren disappeared. It had taken a few years, but even the most cynical of their colleagues had admitted that Will probably wasn’t using his powers covertly to support the other two.

No one even suggested that he had the brains to be pulling the strings. Josie would have taken offense, but she had to admit they were right.

She also had to admit that she didn’t really believe that either Layla or Warren had forced him to go. Steve thought that because he had to, but she was a little more flexible in her views. Even now, what Warren and Layla did had a core of-- not idealism exactly. Josie just didn’t have a better word for it.

She also recognized that, while many corporations and governments were very angry at them over lost money and power, neither Layla nor Warren would otherwise be top priority villains. Because they weren’t trying to do anything that involved enslaving millions of people, destroying the moon, or turning heroes into babies.

So factories burned. Not all of them, just the ones that were the worst in terms of polluting or exploiting workers. Some people died in the fires. Some people starved when the work was gone. But many companies had started at least looking into doing enough better to avoid that attention because the financial cost was too high and because Warren and Layla were tracking the money.

Josie guessed they hadn’t realized that ‘enough better’ was a moving target. It likely wouldn’t be obvious for years yet, but she knew Layla.

The plant life in some protected areas-- and in some areas Layla thought should be protected-- was starting to change. Some of it was adaptations to existing conditions. Some of it was mitigation of those conditions. Some of it was outright hostility to humans carrying anything metallic or petroleum derived.

Josie wasn’t the only person more worried about that than about the factories.

Will said, in his letters, that he was still sure that they were trying to do what they thought was necessary. Josie just couldn’t tell whether or not he was right and wished, almost as much as she wished for Will to come home, that she could sit down and talk with Warren or Layla or both.

Still, she was surprised when Warren wandered in during the very end of an open house she was running and said, “He wants to see you. We’re willing.” 

Josie froze, trying to decide how to get the last civilians out before the fight started.

Warren looked around. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Not hostile. Not unless I have to be.” His expression told her that he would if he had to.

 _Which is why he came and she didn’t. He can. She’d hesitate._ Josie hadn’t ever seen Warren create fire except through his hands. That didn’t mean he couldn’t, but she was pretty sure the hands in pockets were meant to appear less threatening. Just Warren talking to Josie. Not Flashfire talking to Jetstream. Warren and Josie didn’t have to fight.

She turned her back on Warren as one of the potential buyers asked her a question about the basement. She ignored Warren until the last of the other people had left. “Why here?” she asked as she started checking that the doors and windows were shut and locked.

He shrugged. “Finding you without your husband--” He hesitated, studying her face. “He-- Will--” Warren seemed reluctant to say the name. “--said that you'd probably be willing to talk before… anything else. He’d have liked to see Mr Stronghold, too, but-- It seemed unlikely.” For a moment, there was a hint of threat in Warren’s expression, but it vanished behind a smile. “Layla thinks you won’t hurt him.”

Josie’s heart clenched at the thought of Will in pain. “I’m surprised you came personally.” _It would be less weird, and I’d still-- Well, maybe I wouldn’t._ She closed and locked the front door of the house once she and Warren were both on the porch. Then she put the key into the lockbox on the knob.

“Even if you weren’t… who you are to my husband, you’ve always been good to me. To all three of us together.” Warren gave her a look that clearly showed disappointment.

She wondered if it was feigned but couldn’t think why he’d bother. Which made her feel more like trusting him. Which might have been why he bothered. They were in the space between identities. Where Flashfire was Warren and Jetstream was Josie and… Will might possibly be more than ink on paper. Part of her wanted to say something biting about having missed the wedding invitation, but mostly she didn’t want to risk losing what he seemed to be offering.

“It took longer than I wanted to find an open house that would work.”

 _Steve busy. No homeowners present. Yes. That makes sense. But why an open house?_ She nodded even as she calculated angles and noted potential cover. _Probably because someone’s still watching the house and the office._

“Are we going to fight?”

She didn’t bother looking at him. “She might trade you for him.” Then she shrugged. “You already know we aren’t.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him relax a little. His hands were still in his pockets.

“Good.” He pulled out one hand and pointed down the street. “I have a rental. If the FBI supers team doesn’t have a tracker on your car-- Well, I don’t think anyone that stupid survives six months in the field.”

She hesitated.

“The rental’s easier.” He shrugged. ”You’re going to be gone at least a week. Mr Stronghold will notice.” He didn’t quite laugh, and it wasn’t quite fake. “Maybe we should fight. Just for the record.”

“You think you’d win?” She put sharp amusement into the words, using exactly the tone that she used to provoke villains. _I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have._ But she hadn’t missed the implication that he expected her to return home… after, and that made things easier.

She didn’t even try to convince herself that she wouldn’t have gone along anyway.

“You’d escape,” he said. “The only reason for you to stay is because you don’t want me taking out my temper on the neighborhood.”

The Warren she remembered had iron control over his temper, but he wasn’t the Warren she’d known. That Warren had never killed. She hoped that the humor in his words meant that he was joking. She squared her shoulders. “I can’t take the risk.” She started walking toward the car he’d indicated. When they got there, she surrendered her purse and her phone without protest.

Before they left town, Warren stopped a convenience store. He handed her some money. “Buy yourself some water and whatever else you think you’ll want for a long trip.” He met her eyes. “Ten minutes. Then I come in after you.”

She wasn’t quite sure that she believed he would. If seeing Will wasn’t enough motivation to cooperate, her seeing Will wouldn’t be good for anyone. Still, she was back in eight minutes, and she bought tomato juice rather than water. She didn’t hate tomato juice.

He probably hadn’t done anything to the water in the store in advance. There was too much chance she’d get something else, and it would have been a hell of a lot of trouble. Still, Josie hadn’t gotten to her age in her career by assuming that villains made sense.

They didn’t go to the nearest airport. They ended up at a place small enough that it had a single, very short runway and no control tower. The only vehicle in sight was an ultralight. Josie turned to Warren when she saw it. She couldn’t quite hide her disbelief.

“It’s not what it looks like. That’s just--” He almost laughed. “Call it a secret identity.”

Josie never saw the pilot. She and Warren sat in large chairs in a large cabin, facing each other. She wasn’t particularly surprised that the windows were all covered. She suspected that she wouldn’t be able to lift the covers to look outside.

“You’re too likely to recognize where we’re going, to remember the route for later. Most people wouldn’t, but you’re used to doing it.” 

She heard the part Warren didn’t say-- That he knew perfectly well that, if she knew where exactly Will was, she’d bring every hero she knew down on the place in order to free him. “I want to see Will.” She thought that was all she needed to say.

“It was the least bad of the options.” Warren wasn’t talking about kidnapping her.

“I know.” She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “That doesn’t mean it was right.”

Warren sighed. “That’s what he said.”

Warren didn’t offer her anything to eat or drink beyond what she’d bought for herself, but he did smile, a little crookedly, when he saw that she wasn’t drinking water.

They didn’t talk much during the flight. Josie tried, at first, to track the turns that the plane made so that at least she might know what direction they were actually going, but she didn’t know how fast the plane could go, and after a while, she had no idea how long they’d been flying.

 _Of all of this, the worst is knowing that Will can’t fly._ It wasn’t, actually, bad as it was, but she fixed that thought in her mind because any of the worse things would make her attack Warren. Part of her wanted very badly to let loose, to hijack the plane, to rescue Will. She could breathe at these altitudes. She was pretty sure Warren couldn’t. 

Knowing that Will almost certainly didn’t want to be rescued didn’t help at all.

Some time in the middle of the flight, she asked the question that she’d wondered about for years. “If he did change his mind, if he did want to leave, would you let him?”

Warren didn’t answer for several seconds. “I would,” he said at last. “Layla might. She’d think she should. That, combined with me and him, might carry. There are… circumstances.”

She didn’t bother telling him that it sounded like Layla had changed. If Warren didn’t know-- If he didn’t know, he’d say she would let Will go. The person Layla was when she met Warren would have.

“I’m trusting you a lot,” Warren said some time later.

“I had noticed.” And she’d been reassured by it because it meant that Will’s letters weren’t complete lies. She’d wondered occasionally if she believed what was in them only because she desperately wanted to.

“When we land--” Warren didn’t finish the sentence for several seconds. Then he sighed. “There are things you shouldn’t see. Drugs or a hood?”

That required no thought. “Hood.” Not only were drugs riskier, but they’d also delay her seeing Will. She wasn’t sure how long they’d let her stay. Warren’s ‘at least a week’ might mean nothing. She might see Will for seconds, in passing, and spend the rest of that time-- Her imagination failed her. What on earth would he do with her for a week otherwise? ‘At least a week.’ Letting her go again, ever, was implied, not promised. Did she get Warren because she wouldn’t know he was lying?

She still couldn’t think why he’d bother. And it didn’t matter anyway.

Warren let her look the hood over for several minutes and then put it on herself. He asked her permission before touching her to adjust it so that she really couldn’t get even a glimmer of light. They both knew she wasn’t going to say no, but she appreciated being asked. That she could breathe easily through the heavy cloth and that it didn’t have any particularly strong smell, just a tiny hint of cut grass, were pleasant surprises.

She supposed it fit with the way Warren had treated her through the whole journey.

When they disembarked, the weight of the heat and humidity was the first thing she noticed. The air was thick with it. She didn’t feel the sort of angled heat that she’d take for direct sunlight, so she assumed shade, cloud cover, or night. She also couldn’t get any light through the heavy fabric of the hood to tell her where the sun was. She hoped it was high. If it was this warm while it was still night, day would be horrific. 

Even with the cloth covering her face, she smelled damp earth and unfamiliar pollens, so she concluded they were somewhere with abundant native-- or mostly so-- plant life. Layla could make things grow anywhere, but lot of people would have noticed a sudden blooming in the Gobi or the Sahara, and that probably wouldn’t come with this much humidity.

Josie really wanted to be able to wipe the sweat off her face.

The texture and thickness of the air told her they weren’t anywhere high altitude. Summer back home combined with the temperature here to tell her that they couldn’t be far south of the equator. Assuming they were south of it at all.

Warren had kept her hand on his arm so that she’d have something solid to guide her. That had helped quite a bit as they left the plane. She trusted her own abilities, generally, but taking the first step out and down still would have been terrifying because anything at all might have been out there.

Well, she’d guessed they probably weren’t on the moon.

Once they were off the plane, the ground was even enough that she thought she’d have managed without the help, but she didn’t want him to think about things she might be able to do without sight. He-- or Layla-- had thought about her navigating in the air by seeing what the land looked like below or her creating a radius of possibilities for their location based on speed and duration of flight. She was nearly certain they hadn’t considered what information her other senses might need to provide when she flew.

And Will hadn’t told them. 

The information she was getting, in spite of the hood, underlined that Warren and Layla really were taking a risk. She had narrowed the possibilities for their location considerably. She doubted that either of them had considered what Josie might learn just by inhaling. She still hadn’t decided what she was going to do with the information.

It probably depended on Will.

She heard birds and insects and occasional whirring and clanking that she assumed was some sort of machinery. There wasn’t enough in the way of machinery noises for them to be somewhere urban. As if what she smelled hadn’t told her that. As if knowing Layla hadn’t told her that. There weren’t any voices, but she thought she smelled sweat that wasn’t Warren’s or her own, so she assumed that anyone else present was staying silent.

She supposed that Warren guiding her meant she wasn’t going to walk into anyone accidentally. So his courtesy on that count might not have been entirely consideration for her.

The surface underfoot didn’t feel like concrete or any other kind of pavement solid enough to support a landing plane. She didn’t smell fuel or baking asphalt, so maybe Layla had gotten creative. Or someone else working for them had.

“I’m leaving the hood on you until we get to Will’s room,” Warren told her as she heard a heavy door close behind them and felt the temperature and humidity drop.

It wasn’t entirely his choice, but she didn’t remind him of that. There was still a chance, however slight, that he’d change his mind and not let her see her son. They walked for several minutes and more than one flight of stairs, both up and down, before she said, “This is overkill.”

Warren stopped. “I’m trusting you with the most precious thing we have.”

“Eventually, you have to actually trust me.” She doubted that, if he really thought she would hurt Will, he’d have brought her here at all. “And, seriously, not even one elevator? Surely that would confuse me more than seven flights up and six down.”

Warren laughed. He sounded surprised. “Left in about another ten feet.”

She followed.

“We’re nearly there.” Warren hesitated, sounding as if he were having doubts, and Josie tried to think of what she could say to persuade him to let her go on. “Don’t-- It’s easier to hurt him now because he--”

“And whose fault is that?” The words were out before she had time to think better of them. She felt Warren’s muscles tightening under her hand and worried that she’d broken his patience. “I won’t hurt my son. I won’t hurt Will.” She could only hope that Warren believed her, that he knew she wasn’t lying.

“I’m not sure you can avoid it.” Warren didn’t say anything else or move for several seconds. “You might as well take off the hood. There’s no one here for you to see.”

Someone she might identify and trace in order to get back here. 

She pulled her hand free of his arm and used both hands to loosen and remove the hood. Her eyes took a few seconds to adjust to having light again. They were standing in a wide hallway that ended in a solid looking wooden door. There was an intercom in the wall next to the door.

There weren’t any other doors or windows along the corridor, but the walls were painted with flowers. Some of them, Josie thought-- hoped-- were in a style she recognized from old Mother’s Day cards, but she also thought they’d been painted by more than one hand.

“Will’s inside.”

Josie simply looked at Warren for a moment, letting her facial expression ask him what else he thought she expected. _Because you brought me all this way to show me-- what?_

“It locks from the inside.” Warren actually sounded defensive as he started walking toward the door.

Will had repeatedly said that they tried not to make him feel trapped. Even though he was. Josie raised her eyebrows, just to see how Warren would respond.

Warren looked away with an expression that was very definitely shame. Then he raised his hand and knocked on the door.

Flashfire could fight her as Jetstream, Warren could talk to her as Josie, but neither could look at her now, not this close to Will. “Why not buzz?” Somehow, she didn’t doubt that Will was on the other side of the door.

“The buzzer’s too loud, and we don’t need it.” Warren shook his head. “He knows we’re coming. I let him know before we landed.”

When Will opened the door and smiled at her, Josie felt the terror she’d held for three and a half years start to dissolve. 

Will looked healthy but tired. She noted that he really was wearing a suppressor. That didn’t entirely surprise her because Will had mentioned it in his letters, but she’d hoped that it was a lie.

Will glanced at Warren, then nodded and stepped through the doorway to hug her. He had clearly been looking for an all clear not for permission. It hurt a little to realize that her son was as wary as Warren-- no, _more_ wary-- but Josie was glad of that much confirmation that Will still trusted Warren.

“ _Mom_.” Will pulled her into a fierce hug which she returned in full force.

By the time Josie pulled back to look at Will again, Warren was gone. Later, she realized that she’d mostly noticed because some part of her mind still regarded Warren as a threat. In the moment, she laughed through tears and ruffled Will’s hair.

He pulled her in close again, bent a little, and laid his head on her shoulder. He mumbled something into her shirt that she thought was, “I missed you.”

She let her head lean on top of his head. “Oh, Will, we’ve missed you, too.” Some of her tears were because Steve couldn’t be there with them. Maybe next time. Would they get a next time? She started rubbing his back the way she had when he was small.

They stood there for several minutes just revelling in each other’s presence.

Will was the first to pull back. “You need to come inside, Mom.” His smile was painfully familiar; she knew he wanted to surprise her, but just as he had when he was little, he let his eagerness get ahead of him. “You’re going to love her!”

 _Her?_ Josie followed Will inside. Several scents hit her all at once, and it took her a moment to sort them out. 

Spilled milk. Talcum. Clean diapers--

’There are… circumstances,’ Warren had said. Josie understood now why she was being allowed to visit, and she knew she was never getting her son back. She’d known since he failed to come back from his vacation with Warren and Layla, but she realized now that she’d always hoped. She stopped a few steps into the room. “Will--”

At least she’d get this much.

Will took her hand and tugged her toward a door in the wall to the left. “We call her Liza, short for Elizabeth.”

Josie followed her son as he led her to meet her granddaughter.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a baby at the end of this fic. The baby doesn't appear directly. Her existence is the thing driving things in the story that puzzle Josie, so I consider her existence spoilery in that regard.


End file.
